Elon Musk says he’ll turn you into a cyborg in the next decade

Musk told Axios that his neuroscience company, Neuralink, will have the technology “probably” within the next decade to fuse humans with artificial intelligence. In order to do this, Musk says Neuralink will produce an “electrode-to-neuron interface at a micro level,” basically “a chip and a bunch of tiny wires” that will be implanted into your skull.

So why does Musk want to turn us into cyborgs? He says it’s humanity’s only hope to survive the upcoming glut of super-intelligent machines powered by artificial intelligence that will take over the world and would otherwise push humanity to extinction.
2018-11-26 07:16:07 Read the full story.

Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines

The big picture: Musk said artificial intelligence is “just digital intelligence. And as the algorithms and the hardware improve, that digital intelligence will exceed biological intelligence by a substantial margin. It’s obvious.” And he said we’re way behind: “We’re like children in a playground … We’re not paying attention. We worry more about … what name somebody called someone else … than whether AI will destroy humanity. That’s insane…
2018-11-26 10:56:11.468000+00:00 Read the full story.

Elon Musk believes AI could turn humans into an endangered species like the mountain gorilla

Elon Musk told “Axios on HBO” about his AI company Neuralink, and its efforts to develop technology that creates a symbiosis between humans and AI to try and curb the possibility of an existential threat to humanity.

Neuralink is Musk’s neuroscience company, which is trying to develop an interface for AI technology with the human brain. He describes it as “electrode to neuron interface at a micro level,” or in layman’s terms “a chip and a bunch …
2018-11-26 00:00:00 Read the full story (PAYWALL).

CloudQuant Thoughts… A quiet news week this week, this is not “news” really, Elon has been saying this for a long time, from the recent famous Joe Rogan “pot smoking” interview back to my oft mentioned Wait but Why 2015 article, all that is new is that he appeared in an Axios interview on HBO.

A Closer Look at Voice-Assisted Speakers (Video 45m)

U.S. consumers are expected to drop a bundle this Black Friday on smart speakers and home hubs. A Nov. 15 Canalys report estimates that shipments of voice-assisted speakers grew 137 percent in Q3 2018 year-to-year and are on the way to 75 million-unit sales in 2018. At the recent Embedded Linux Conference and Open IoT Summit in Edinburgh, embedded Linux developer and Raspberry Pi HAT creator Leon Anavi of the Konsulko Group reported on the latest smart speaker trends. As Anavi noted in his “Comparison of Voice Assistant SDKs for Embedded Linux Devices” talk, conversing with computers became a staple of science fiction over half a century ago. Voice technology is interesting “because it combines AI, big data, IoT, and application development,” said Anavi.

The Mycroft AI agent is enabled via a Python based Mycroft Pulse SDK, and a Mycroft Skills Manager is available for Skills development. Like Alexa and Assistant, Mycroft supports custom wake words.
2018-11-21 15:08:21+00:00 Read the full story.

CloudQuant Thoughts… I enjoy these videos where the presenter demonstrates how simple and clean the back-end is for many of these systems.

Pentagram designed the prettiest computer chip you’ve ever seen

Computer chips work behind the scenes, powering your internet surfing, video streaming, and gaming. Because they’re just little bits of hardware, the engineers that make them rarely spend time thinking about what they should look like. After all, most people will never even see them.

Yet the prominent design agency Pentagram recently created a downright gorgeous computer chip for the the U.K.-based startup Graphcore. Why bother? Because as so much of our computing is moving into the cloud, Graphcore’s chips, which are designed to run machine learning algorithms, will mostly be located in server farms. And the company, with help from Pentagram, is betting on design to help it stand out on the server rack–even if the only people that ever see the chips are the engineers who maintain the servers.
2018-11-26 09:00:56 Read the full story.

CloudQuant Thoughts…“betting on design to help it stand out on the server rack–even if the only people that ever see the chips are the engineers who maintain the servers.” It is interesting that these AI chip firms are starting to think like consumer firms. They want the rack engineers to recognize their equipment.

Below the Fold…

Instagram doesn’t want you faking your way to popularity

Instagram, not surprisingly, wants its service to be about human connections, not bots pelting members with spam interactions. It says that such apps violate its terms of service. And now it’s using machine learning to identify inauthentic activity and undo it. The company says it will notify the people who use such apps that it’s deleted the synthetic interactions, and will make them change their passwords so the apps can no longer hijack their accounts.
2018-11-19 13:00:17 Read the full story.

What Is Machine Learning? We Drew You Another Flowchart

The vast majority of the AI advancements and applications you hear about refer to a category of algorithms known as machine learning. Machine learning is the process that powers many of the services we use today—recommendation systems like those on Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify; search engines like Google and Baidu; social-media feeds like Facebook and Twitter; voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. The list goes on.

In all of these instances, each platform is collecting as much data about you as possible—what genres you like watching, what links you are clicking, which statuses you are reacting to—and using machine learning to make a highly educated guess about what you might want next. Or, in the case of a voice assistant, about which words match best with the funny sounds coming out of your mouth.Frankly, this process is quite basic: find the pattern, apply the pattern. But it pretty much runs the world. That’s in big part thanks to an invention in 1986, courtesy of Geoffrey Hinton, today known as the father of deep learning.

The Hard Questions of Hiring For Machine Learning

I’ve been thinking a lot about hiring for the machine learning specialization lately. It’s no surprise. New data is emerging almost daily about the rise of machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning in software design. Just recently, IDC reported that spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems is set to accelerate well beyond original forecasts by more than 300% in the next five years. Even a survey at my company revealed that almost two-third of enterprises are experimenting with AI.

This means we’re always on the lookout for machine learning talent to work on our service-centric AIOps platform, and it’s like panning for gold. The New York Times reported that there are about 10,000 people in the world with the skills to handle the hardest problems in AI. Of course, we’re not just looking for one of these unicorns. We need teams of them to work on building solutions with neural network architecture, Naive Bayes Classifications, and Singular Value Decomposition. That means we need experts in data science, who can use data to validate models, and engineering, who can code the mathematics into the software. Simple, right? Not really. Here’s how we attack this problem fundamentally, with a few of our tried-and-true interview questions that help us find the intelligent minds behind artificial intelligence…
2018-11-22 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Deriving Business Value from Data Science Deployments

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations trying to derive value from data science and machine learning is deployment. In this post, we’ll take a look at three common approaches to deploying data science projects, and how Anaconda Enterprise simplifies deployment and allows data scientists to focus on building better models that generate business value rather than wasting time on infrastructure.

Self-Service Data Preparation – At Scale or Sampling?

The phrase “data is the new oil” has become the favorite business transformation cliché of the past 10 years. The truth is that data in its raw form is about as useful for decision making as oil is for propelling a car. Data preparation is key to making data useful and involves the process of collecting, cleaning, blending, and ultimately making it available for the intended use – whether for analytics or another application.

While IT-centric data prep has been around for decades, self-service data prep tools that are designed specifically for business users and analysts is new. Despite the benefits and the new ease of use features, not all self-service data prep solutions are equal when it comes to dealing with real life data types, complexity and volumes.
2018-11-26 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Inside Pachyderm, a Containerized Alternative to Hadoop

Last week was a big one for Pachyderm, the containerized big data platform that’s emerging as an easier-to-use alternative to Hadoop. With a $10 million round of funding, public testimonials from customers like the Defense Department and AgBiome, and a new release of the software its creators say runs 1,000 times faster, the potential for Pachyderm to have an impact in big data are growing by the day.

The Pachyderm story starts back in late 2013. Doliner and Joey Zwicker were working at a Y Combinator startup called RethinkDB, when they saw an early tech preview of what would become Docker from Solomon Hykes, its creator. Both of the technologists were immediately impressed, and they started working on a way to leverage Docker to solve some of the problems that were emerging in the big data space.
2018-11-20 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Data science in a database? – Cuemacro

If you have a burger, a pretty important part is the patty. If the patty is awful, the rest of the burger is going to be pretty bad. However, just having good beef is not sufficient. You can overcook it, put too little fat in the patty, and ruin the beef. In a sense, data science is like making a burger. The data is the beef and how you cook it, is basically all the analytic work you do on top of it. Ok, maybe the analogy isn’t perfect, but I was mainly looking for an excuse to put burgers into the article.

Within finance, you are likely to be dealing with time series. Typically this can involve prices, but often it can be derived from many other datasets, which have been structured into this form. Often data is stored in database (or flat files), these are loaded up and then you can start analysing them (say using Python and libraries like pandas). However, we can often face the choice of doing some analytical work within the database first, before outputting it to our main analytics platform, such as Python.
2018-11-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Samsung Showcases AI-Powered Medical Software For Diagnostic Devices

Samsung’s medical division Samsung Medison Co. has introduced various software for medical devices that have artificial intelligence technologies at the ongoing Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) 2018. The first software that Samsung announced at the event was the S-Detect for Breast. This software is designed to analyze breast lesions with the use of ultrasound images. As such, the technology is capable of collecting big data that could help in accurately diagnosing patients, Yonhap has learned.

Because S-Detect has AI technology, it could produce far better results than traditional software. “By using AI technology, the Bone Suppression function, which reduces the bone signal from the chest X-ray image, clearly brings out the lung tissues obscured by the bones,” Samsung explained. Samsung also showcased a prototype software for MRI devices. The new technology compares data of patients and normal or healthy people using artificial intelligence. This is said to help doctors analyze abnormal conditions better.
2018-11-26 05:22:17-05:00 Read the full story.

The story of automation in financial services is one told with heavy hype.

Reportedly driver technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, the buzzwords artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) have seen an explosion in growth and investment, according to Guy Kirkwood of automation specialists, UIPath, which recently closed a $400m funding round and is as of today valued at $3bn.

“Three years ago no one knew what RPA stood for,” said Kirkwood. “The hype in the market is just incredible, but Phil Fersht, chief analyst of FSH, says the hype is fully justified based on the growth in the market and a realisation among businesses that they have to automate,” said Kirkwood.
2018-11-26 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Over the years, technology has made great strides in the development of medical equipment. Scientific techniques, medications and equipment have greatly advanced the reach of medicine. However, despite these advancements, there are areas of healthcare where manual data entry, repetition and inaccuracies exist, leading to inefficiencies and frustrations for both healthcare workers and patients. Healthcare professionals remain understaffed, performing important but tedious activities. With the rising aging population and limited socioeconomic resources, the stress on the world’s medical systems remains critical and demands critical solutions. This is where we believe artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial emotional intelligence (AEI) can help. In the very near future, the use of AI as an artificial nurse’s aid is one way technology can help increase the efficiency and quality of healthcare.
2018-11-26 06:00:01-05:00 Read the full story.

Top VC deals: Geek+ lands $150M; PlayVS picks up major league backer

Beijing-based robotics company Geek+ completed a $150 million Series B round from backers including Warburg Pincus, Volcanics Venture and Vertex Ventures. The company develops artificial intelligence and robotics technology for supply chain and warehouse applications.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Strategic Investment Fund participated in a $8 million Series B financing for CropIn Technology Solutions. The start-up uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing to optimize crop yield for farmers in India.
2018-11-23 00:00:00 Read the full story.

I have spent many years helping organizations gain control and management over their unstructured data or information. The days where we looked for one content management solution to capture and manage our valued unstructured data (information) are long gone.

Organizations are now faced with the challenge of implementing multiple content management solutions focused on many tiers within the organization…
2018-11-23 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Why Blackberry Is Buying Cylance for $1.4 Billion

On Friday, Blackberry Ltd. (BB) announced that it would acquire artificial intelligence (AI) company Cylance for $1.4 billion in cash. The deal is seen as helping the Canadian technology company carry out its transition from making smartphones to selling software and doubling down on emerging businesses such as self-driving vehicles. Acquiring Irvine, California-based Cylance will specifically work to build upon Blackberry’s QNX unit, aimed at creating software for next-gen autonomous vehicles. In 2016, Blackberry, once the world’s number one mobile brand, ceased manufacturing its keyboard-centric phones in-house, marking its larger shift to launching cybersecurity products such as enterprise platform security software and Internet of Things (IoT) device security.
2018-11-19 10:56:00-07:00 Read the full story.

Esprit’s Revamp To Cost US$255 Million As Fashion Retailer Wields Axe On Staff And Stores Globally

As part of the restructuring, Esprit also plans to use artificial intelligence to understand its customer base and offer in-demand products, said CEO Anders. Around half of its current products are high fashion but most customers want basics, he noted as an example.

“We have 6.6 million customers in our loyalty base and we don’t really use that data to give customers what they want,” he said. “Going forward we are going to be much more customer driven, using AI to understand what you as a customer buy, what you as a customer like.”
2018-11-26 06:02:52-05:00 Read the full story.

Will Machines Run the World? Steve Wozniak Gives His Thoughts

Will machines end up running the world? Not to worry, according to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple ( AAPL – Get Report) . Machines guided by artificial intelligence (AI) do not wake up in the morning and ask: “What should I do today?” That is what humans do. AI will allow, however, for amazing advances in how machines can handle specific tasks, including very complex and inter-related tasks.

If Moore’s Law of technological advancement holds for AI, there will be job disruptions that arrive ever more rapidly. As AI-guided machines take over tasks, humans can focus on other endeavors. This has critical policy and economic implications; however, worrying about machines becoming human is not one of them.
2018-11-26 09:18:44-05:00 Read the full story.

Good cyber security starts with boards that ask questions

Not a day seems to go by when there isn’t a story in the media about a data breach, commercial espionage or a cyber intrusion where there is ‘no evidence that any data was stolen’. The narrative that companies didn’t know about a breach or were somehow victims is all too common. There is also a constant barrage of news (and hype) about the benefits of machine learning, data being the ‘new oil’ and the potential impact of artificial intelligence and all that comes with it. So, at the same time as squeezing the virtual marrow out of each piece of data, some organisations are not adequately defending the very systems that create, access, store and protect this data. The drudgery of getting cyber security right is something that boards of companies (be they listed or not) still grapple with. Board trips to Israel and Silicon Valley may help directors shape their strategic outlook, but they do little to enhance their understanding of the actual day-to-day cyber risk their organisation is most likely trying to manage.
2018-11-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

…”We’re taking sensor data off a dragline excavator, putting it into an algorithm and doing some machine learning to produce recommendations on maintenance planning, inspection schedules and when that piece of equipment should be upgraded,” Mr Gerard said…
2018-11-22 00:00:00 Read the full story.

The data firms hired by ICE to hunt people down raise alarm about a hidden surveillance industry

Last week, five activists in Vermont sued the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement immigration agency for violating their First Amendment rights, alleging that the agency used techniques typically reserved for disrupting organized crime networks to track their movements for years.

…Adding to privacy and security concerns surrounding personal data is a growing reliance on machine learning algorithms to mine and draw conclusions from it. A growing body of research has shown that biases in AI can lead to unfair outcomes, especially among persons of color. “This is what social scientists and computer scientists are actively trying to do—we are working to make these kinds of projects better,” says Forbes. Meanwhile, she says, policy makers and the public at large will need to reckon with larger questions about privacy, and how the technology is deployed…
2018-11-20 10:00:34 Read the full story.

Why era of big data era requires businesses to take an evidence-based approach

Rapidly evolving technology trends such as artificial intelligence and big data are rewriting the fundamental rules by which businesses operate, according to an industry expert.

Andrew McAfee, co-founder and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, says approaches that have been regarded as best practice for years are now being questioned and replaced by new strategies. He says it is vital for business leaders to understand what is occurring or risk losing out to rivals that do.

“The right way to run a factory in the era of steam power became a really bad way once electric power was available,” McAfee says. “We are at a similarly big change point in the world, and some of the smart things we have been taught are not just becoming out of date, but are actually becoming wrong.”
2018-11-23 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Everything You Need to Know About Apple in One News Cycle

Apple loves to dazzle, and its recent spate of hardware introductions want to tell the world it’s back, baby. Don’t get too excited, though.

…Finally, Apple has reportedly purchased Silk Labs, an artificial intelligence startup with a privacy-first approach, where processes are handled on-device rather than being sent to the cloud.
2018-11-26 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Israel and Singapore taking different paths to innovation

…Slimovsky says Israel also has access to markets and in recent years those markets have been in the automotive and cyber security sectors for example. Interestingly, while the country has no actual automotive industry to speak of, it is a leader in developing AI for vehicles. “There is a lot of activity in the automotive space and a lot of this technology comes from the Israeli army which is where a lot of innovation is developed.”

The reason for this innovation is because of Israel’s compulsory military service where not everyone is part of the fighting force. Some units in the army focus on developing technology for military purposes such as satellite imaging, machine learning and even for taking care of casualties. When individuals leave the army, they have the knowledge which they then try to use for civilian purposes. The automotive sector is one such example. “A lot of the AI driving autonomous vehicles has its origin in the Israeli army. All of the big automotive players are coming here. Daimler have set up a research and development centre in Israel as have Volkswagen and General Motors who have their only R&D centre outside the United States here…
2018-11-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Incremental changes can produce the optimum results

…He cites AGL’s initial work with smart metering where a small team of analysts experimented with and began to interpret the type of data coming from smart meters. “Through that small experiment, they could understand different patterns and through those patterns, they can now provide value added services to our customers such as advice on where and how they can save money.” “We were able to find ways to save customers’ money by the use of machine learning and analytics and that was started through a very small team who first started to understand patterns which allowed them to gain an insight into finding value for customers,” Moorfield says. He says this bet on small changes has worked a number of times in AGL. Getting an understanding of what could be done and the sort of capability the company had internally gave it the confidence to undergo its $300 million transformation. “The thing is you have to try and experiment whenever you touch new technologies. Start small, learn it and then scale it when you can,” Moorfield says.
2018-11-25 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Royal Navy ships could be controlled remotely by officers on land, says BAE Systems

Royal Navy ships could in future be controlled remotely by captains on land using new augmented reality headsets and artificial intelligence technologies being developed by a UK defence company. The technology could pave the way for semi-autonomous naval vessels with much smaller crews, according to BAE Systems. Transferring naval command rooms that are currently always on-board vessels onto land could reduce the risks to sailors and improve safety during combat, according to the British defence company. Frank Cotton, BAE chief technology officer for naval systems, said: “The concept of the future Navy control room that we are working with is that it will not actually be on-board the ship. We think this will work because we know that you can have pilots in a Texas desert controlling drones that fly over Afghanistan. So why not have the officers somewhere safe, instead of on-board?”
2018-11-22 00:00:00 Read the full story.

Behind a Paywall/Registration Wall…

Microsoft’s CTO lays out the 2 tech trends he believes will change the world: ‘People haven’t wrapped their heads around this yet’

At most companies, the chief technology officer is tasked with overseeing the engineering teams and basically making sure the company is staking its technological bets in an intelligent way.

At a company like Microsoft, where there are tens of thousands of engineers all over the world testing and building and prodding in an unknowable number of directions at any given time, the CTO’s role can be a little bit broader, said Kevin Scott, who’s held…
2018-11-24 00:00:00 Read the full story.

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